What is a “New Media Specialist”?
February 5, 2012 by Ginger
Filed under Social Media
After running my own Web Design company from home for 10 years, getting back into the 9-5 job market was an adventure, to say the least. Having devoted myself to building full blown Content Management Sites (CMS) using WordPress for function and customized themes for design, I was happy to find out that I hadn’t limited myself to something that I couldn’t apply in today’s workforce. WordPress knowledge and experience were actually in demand in the 3-D world that existed outside my home!
Having a strong background in Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is always a skill that’s in demand, so coupled with my Social Media (SM) and Blogging knowledge and experience I brought a lot to the table no matter where I interviewed. Having been out of the mainstream workforce for so long, I was relieved to find that the payscale for my area of expertise was actually fair. It wasn’t long before I was working full time, doing something I love. I am thankful for that every day.
In short, a New Media Specialist is kept busy with web development, site maintenance, SEO, Blogging, Social Media Management, Branding, Marketing, and to an extent, Public Relations (PR). In my opinion, PR and SM go hand in hand today.
As an employed, full-time New Media Specialist I spend a lot of my time researching Internet and Marketing trends. As technology advances, it’s my responsibility to not only keep up with everything as it evolves, but I also have to be innovative enough to create my own strategies to take advantage of all that these brave new technologies have to offer. Companies that fail to keep up with the trends and advancements are failing to continue their past successes. Companies that embrace the changes (by hiring someone like me) are seeing increased sales, increased brand awareness, and their biggest worries are “growing pains”.
As I spend my personal time researching, I sometimes like to share what I’m finding. If you’re interested in bringing more success to your business, you may want to consider the information I share. If not, that’s cool… then I’ll just use this kind of post for my own reference, and steer the occasional client to them as information they NEED to know. 
The Benefits of Using Social Media to Market Your Business
- It can help build reputation and give your business great exposure.
- It provides cost-effective free advertising.
- It helps you to connect with key people in the industry.
- It helps you to discover what the public likes through feedback.
- Your business gains new traffic and increased sales.
- It can assist in getting public opinions when launching new products and services.
*These are all great reasons to choose social media to help market your business.
Things you don’t want to find when researching a site you’re working on…
Analytics – NONE
-
What we found: No analytics scripts found at all.
-
Effects on traffic: While this won’t affect your traffic, it is what you need to measure YOUR traffic. We’re looking for 8 of the top analytics tools out there.
-
Your options: Learn how to install Google Analytics | More info on page optimizations
- What we found: Wait! We’re detecting that you’re not redirecting the non-www version of your website to the www version (or vice versa). By not doing so, you’re creating essentially two versions of your website that can confuse the search engines when it comes time to rank your site.
-
Effects on traffic: Smaller infractions of duplicate content, like the www redirect (the one we’re looking for here) can have a moderate impact on traffic. You may see after doing the proper 301 redirect from www to non-www (or vice versa) will result in moderately better rankings. Actual duplicate content, where you post the exact content on two different websites for instance, have a much higher impact. It is highly likely only one of those sites will rank with the content, and a small chance that both will not rank at all. Avoid duplicate content!
- Your options: See how to fix yourself | More info on duplicate content
My Social Media Philosophy
Using Social Media to increase brand awareness and improve the “customer experience” is a topic for another day. The main thing I find myself repeating consistently is that in order for SM to benefit your business, it must be interactive (s-o-c-i-a-l)! Linking a blog to a Twitter account so that it spits out your blog’s post links is not interactive.
Social Media must be measured, monitored, and nurtured. Building a community out of your target market should be your goal when utilizing SM in your marketing strategy. If it’s not, you should really reconsider using it at all, because lack of activity in SM could do more to damage your brand than help it.
Ginger Douglas New Media Specialist Habana Premium Cigar Club, Inc. Publish date 2/4/2012
More posts from this catagory
- » In Social Media, think "Opportunity" not "Challenges"
- » First Google+, now Google Search PLUS Your World
- » Is LinkedIn really a "Social Network"?
- » Why I Launched a Shareletter instead of a Newsletter
- » Weekly Roundup - Resources from our forums
As an enthusiastic advocate of WordPress as a fully functional CMS, Ginger designs exclusive themes to brand you and your business to create a powerful and credible Internet presence. She conducts coaching and consulting sessions locally in NY's Capital Region, as well as over the phone and web. When she's not ripping WordPress code apart, she's riding a Harley-Davidson and drinking Dunkin' Donuts coffee. ~~
Services | Facebook | Twitter
blogging, branding, marketing, new media specialist, public relations, search engine optimization, social media, web development
Comments
One Response to “What is a “New Media Specialist”?”Trackbacks
Check out what others are saying about this post...[...] very narrow, niche interest? But after some thought, and applying some of my past experiences as a New Media Specialist, I came to see that what I was facing was actually an incredible and rare [...]